SharePoint is a great product to use, if you know how to leverage it properly. Thousands of companies out there that use SharePoint sadly miss out on some of the great quirks that SharePoint has to offer. One of my favourite ones is the ability to generate an entire portal structure on the fly. Not only does this save you time in the painstaking process of making sites and subsites (and assigning the right templates to them), but it also provides a clean structure which you can revisit at any time for restructuring or redesign purposes with little effort.

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Welcome to my blog. Yes, I’ve been an IT professional for almost ten years, and I’ve never had a blog before now. I can’t explain that myself, but here I am so hopefully you get to enjoy my posts, and maybe learn something cool from them! If you like it (or not), please comment, constructive critcism is always welcome.

So, before we get to explaining “Pax Perfectus” let me tell you a bit about myself. I’m a first-generation Canadian immigrant. I live in beautiful Atlantic Canada, in a little province called New Brunswick. I was born in Tanzania (East Africa) in the late 70’s, and my parents migrated to the United Arab Emirates (of Dubai fame) when I was young to seek a “better life” for my elder sister & I. My father (and subsequently, myself) is of Yemeni origins, even though I’ve never visited Yemen in my life (yes I plan to make the trip some day, I hear it’s beautiful). So I grew up in the UAE. In summer, most kids went to summer school or camp or stayed at home and watched TV or whatever. Not me, I always went to my dad’s company (he started and ran a series of successful computer repair and training companies like CESCO and ATCOS), the company bought and fixed every computer you could think of at the time, from the ancient IBM PCs to Sinclairs, and MSX’s to the good ol’ Commodore 64’s and 128’s. It was actually the first such company founded in the UAE at a time when people didn’t even know what the hell a computer was (except maybe that it was an expensive electronic toy, or an oversized calculator).

So, one day, when I was 8 years old, I was rudely and suddenly exposed to programming. It all started when I sneaked into the computer repair room, hooked up the nearest Apple II and grabbed a 5.25″ disk (yeah, remember those?) with the game “Wilderness Campaign” in it. While I was enjoying attacking rabid wolves and abominal snowmen, all of a sudden the game crashed and spewed a whole bunch of garbage. Normal kids would’ve left the damn thing alone, rebooted and started a new game or something, but no, not me; I was abnormal. With my stubborn nature, I was determined to somehow “fix it”. I started reading the garbage and could make up words, like “if… then” and “goto 15″ (yes, this was BASIC!) so as I was reading this for some reason it made a lot of sense, like connecting the dots. I was told by the computer that it crashed at a certain line, which pointed to a very simple math formula that somehow went awry. So I put two and two together and fixed it, and imagine the look on my face when I reran the program, and I could play without a hitch! Once I figured out the mechanics of the code a few days later, I hacked the game to give me unlimited canteens & gold, that way I was more or less invulnerable in the game. That’s when I realized: coding was awesome!!… Inadverdently entering the domain of tech geeks and earning a pair of spectacles.

So, that story summarizes two things that particularly characterize my passions: programming and games, and that’s also what drove me (12 years later) to build one of the coolest and most popular browser-based text adventure/RPGs of all time, but that’s a story for another day.

Ok, let’s go back to “Pax Perfectus”, so in latin, Pax = Peace and Perfectus = Complete (more or less). That’s actually got something to do with my name. My first name, Salem (derived from the root SLM), is arabic for peaceful (or alternatively, safe) (think arabic “Salam” akin to Hebrew “Shalom”, which means Peace), and my last name, Al-Tamimi, can be derived to the Arabic root word TAM (like Hebrew, Arabic words are often translated by taking them back to their root word, then expanding on that based on context). So, TAM in arabic means, yeah, you guessed it, Complete. So that word in the form of: Al-Tamimi, could very well mean “perfectionist”, so now you have Pax Perfectus, “Complete Peace”, or the Peaceful Perfectionist… More or less.